Licensing for source code contained in Emacs manuals

[Daniel Pittman <slippycheeze@google.com>]

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G'day.  The question of licensing for code derived from a sample contained
in the flymake manual came up, and I wanted to follow up to ensure
appropriate compliance with the license terms.

This is copied to the FSF licensing team, as I strongly suspect they are
appropriate to correct any misapprehensions that I have about the licenses,
their application, or the other questions at hand.

The source in question is here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/flymake/An-annotated-example-backend.html

That manual is licensed under the GFDL, appropriately.  The code, I think,
is sufficiently large and involved that it can't be reused arbitrarily as
"fair use", or any other general licensing exception.

Now, I'm pretty certain the intent was that this code could be reused for
the purpose of developing flymake backends, and it is a copy of code that
was under the GPL prior to inclusion – although it is not directly
including that code, and has extended the commentary.

The manual in question, the GFDL itself, and the GNU/FSF FAQ about
licensing provide no exceptions for the case of relicensing the sample code
that I am able to find.

As far as I can tell, this means that anything derived from that sample
code would also be covered by the GFDL, including the provisions for
invariant sections, which do not really make sense in the context of "I
wrote a flymake backend."


On checking, none of the other Emacs manuals seem to have any documented
exception to the GFDL for sample code either; the Emacs manual mentions the
GPL, but only in the context of Emacs itself, noting the manual is undir
the GFDL.


Would it be appropriate to extend the documentation to explicitly permit
reuse of the sample code in the Emacs flymake manual, or all Emacs manuals,
under the same license as Emacs itself?  That is, sample code could be used
under the GFDL *or* the GPLv3 (at this time).


If I have missed something, and I am definitely not an IP licensing lawyer,
please let me know, and I'll be very happy to be corrected. :)

Thanks for your time.

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